| Members of organizations interact in ways that promote or inhibit organizational learning. Their behavior is guided by taken-for-granted systems of concepts, assumptions, and values. Helping individuals learn to act in ways more conducive to organizational learning is thus a problem of re-education. The tacit expertise displayed in everyday interaction must be restructured by embedding new concepts in skillful practice.; Theories of re-education distinguish between learning new skills as discrete techniques and becoming skillful in a theory of practice as a whole. Successful re-education requires integrating new techniques into a coherent system of concepts, assumptions, and values. Relatively little is known about how this occurs.; Re-education requires educators who must themselves be educated. This dissertation addresses the question, how does a practitioner learn to put concepts to use in order to become skillful in a new theory of practice, when the intention is also to help others learn?; The dissertation traces the learning of an organization development consultant as he learned to use the theory of action approach to intervention developed by Argyris and Schon. The first year and a half of the learning activities are reported briefly. Attention focuses on the following six months as the participant tape recorded his work and reflected on it in weekly interviews.; A conceptual metaphor, the zone of reflection, is proposed to guide research and educational practice. Reflective talk provides a window on the zone of reflection. The development of conceptual understanding and skill can be traced in slices of reflection over time. The probes of the researcher can be understood as interventions into the zone of reflection that both generate data and promote learning.; The transition from discrete techniques to integrated practice is investigated first by considering changes in using a conceptual cluster, the ladder of inference. Second, changes in using characteristic phrases or recipes are traced. The shift to more integrated practice is mediated by achieving higher levels of perspective-taking and by learning to see larger patterns or story lines in problematic situations. Finally, the participant's increasing differentiation from the educators and their theory is described. |
